State and Civil Society in China and India

STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN CHINA AND INDIA
SOME PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS

This paper is divided into three parts. An attempt is made in the first place to analyse the current thinking on state and civil society in a broad historical perspective with a view to finding out the implications that help to analyse emerging trends in China and India.

In the second part an attempt will be made to analyse the experience of the last four decades in China and India to examine the nature of social and political formations and if pos­sible, to find out its projections in the future. I restrict myself only to the last four decades as otherwise the analysis may become rather lengthy for the present paper.

The third part tries to explore alternative possibilities whereby both India and China may by to restructure their state and the civil society.

I

In both the Marxist and non-­Marxist social science research, the state has of late tended to shed off some of its credibility as an organisa­tion aimed at protecting and promoting freedom and growth. This loss of credi­bility on the part of the state is appar­ently all-pervading beginning with the concept of state in western democra­cies, the socialist state of East Euro­pean societies and of the erstwhile Soviet Union and the nationalist state of a large and disparate part of the globe, known loosely as the Third World.

The major direction emerging from this definitive fall in the role of the state points towards the expansion of the sphere and role of civil society. It is argued that many of the functions that had hitherto been performed by the state apparatus can be logically transferred to the civil society. In particular, the productive energies that remain under-utilised under state control and management need to be freed in order to benefit from the market forces available under global struc­tures of integrated world economy.

This is broadly the intellectual context in which China and India have launched their current economic re­forms. The emphasis is on the develop­ment of intermediate organisations that would, more or less, directly oper­ate and compete in a global network without bureaucratic and wasteful modes of state intervention.

In this scenario, the task of gradually marginalizing the state has rather anomalously, to be performed by the state itself. Appropriate institu­tions of civil society have first to be created by the state and then empow­ered to take over some of its func­tions. Among the tasks slated for transfer are enhanced powers of deci­sion-making and management of inter­national trade. In both China and India, economic liberalization has conveyed precisely this message.

But I think, China is a purer case than India in terms of decontrolling strategies. The state in China, as I gather from printed sources, has created massive spaces for global market forces to move in. It has also allowed as a matter of policy a vast range of intermediate structures to move out and find a place for them­selves in world economy. India has a similar agenda and while it stated to implement the reformist package much before China, its pace, on ac­count of various factors, has been rather slow and cautious and it is presently lagging behind.

At this point, let us look into the genesis of the tug of war between the state and the civil society. The word “state” makes its appearance only in the beginning of the 16th century and the notion of “society”, as this term is understood presently, comes into vogue only two centuries later. The Greeks know only the “polis” which was a church, a society and a state, all at once. The medieval western world knew only the king, the feudal estates and the Church. It was Renaissance that first produced the conception of a state, as distinguished from monar­chy (state). The state there was to rationally create itself into a system of sustainable political community exer­cising control, management and pro­moting expansion. The credit for this theoretical breakthrough is usually given to Machiavelli. This conception soon created new sources of conflict with a Church. Secularization armed the state with new sources of wealth and power, often taken over from the Church, and in this process the state became the new protector of people. As it began to enlarge its exclusive hold over life and existence, the need was felt once again for an alternative jurisdiction and it was then that the notion of an autonomous sphere of social relationships, which would be free from both the Church and the State, was brought into western intellectual discourse.

“Society” in the medieval Christian worldview was the sinful realm of the mundane. It was only the Enlight­enment that first produced the theory of the natural rights of man and con­ceptualized a series of intermediate structures between the individual and the state. A doctrine of fierce individu­alism followed. The modem notion of society, as a total complex of social relationships, appeared in reaction to this utilitarian individualism.

At this point, the phrase “civil society” was juxtaposed with: political community broadly indicating more or less autonomous spheres of loyalty and involvement which could be adhered to and upheld simultane­ously. However various contending versions of this relationship were articulated in western intellectual his­tory assigning highly controversial positions to state and civil society. In one version, the society came first and created the state; in another version, the state itself allowed the civil society to come into existence. The vision of the withering away of the state was matched by hopes of an omniscient state rebuilding a perfect man and a perfect society almost from the scratch.

The issues have not yet been settled. In the newest version of this debate, each step taken by the state is seen as an intrusion into civil society, signifying newer levels of oppression. The sphere of the state is often associ­ated with inefficiency and bureaucratic waste. The solution lies in creating autonomous spaces for individual ini­tiative and enterprise. In this intellec­tual arena, market has become the new avenue of salvation.

But if decision-making is trans­ferred to intermediate structures of civil society, the demands of the-mar­ket would outweigh political choices, which may not be desirable in the long run. In the ultimate analysis, market has no values, it knows only prices.

Critics of the reformist agenda in China and India have already voiced these fears. The reformist design how­ever continues unabated. How does one read the emerging trends and weigh the prospects of change as these societies confront the 21st century?

II

There is as yet no reason to think that the coming decade will bring in any substantial change in agenda of reform in China or India. It seems reasonable to suggest that the social and political formations that have emerged in the last forty years or so would be carried over into the 21st century.

In the homogenized world of social science discourse, the state is expected in both China and India to empower intermediate structure of civil society so that the latter could become efficient instruments of ushering in freedom and growth. In this common­ality of vision, China and India share the ideology. But the actual experience of translating this vision into practice is laden with very distinct. Chinese and Indian characteristics. As China and India face the 21st century, this distinction is going to become sharper.

Atleast from the mid-19th century onwards, China and India reveal, as a matter of fact, two very different civilizationally-filtered ways of receiv­ing and utilizing inputs of the western impact. When China was seeking western arms and technology to strengthen the state, India was then keen to absorb western learning pri­marily for ensuring personal and social freedom. All along the line, reformers in China and India have continued to opt for different kinds of West. China’s dream has been a powerful and effi­ciently-managed state which would produce a new citizen and remake the whole society. Indian reformers, on the other hand, have tried to work for a new kind of modem outlook and a cor­respondingly modem kind of society system.”

These dreams were given a new lease of life when China and India fi­nally got opportunities - China after her liberation and India after her in­dependence - for building new states and societies of their own choice and making.

The state in China took up in right earnest the role of charting out a new social order as if on a blank sheet of paper. Almost overnight, new bases and new superstructures were created to marginalize existing forms of civil society. The government moved right inside the family, the household, the farms, the factories, the schools and into practically every organisation to create new sets of relationships. The state did this with a consensual affirmation of its legitimacy. At no point was the role of the state questioned; only the form it took at certain points became a matter of serious debate.

In India, the centre stage is occupied by civil society; the political func­tions of the state must filter through local and regional interest groups. As a patron, the state has essentially to give in and concede demands articulated by organized sectors of civil society. Administrative units of governance and civil codes are thus created in response to regional and minority demands. The state operates as a residual category; the great issues that are predominant in India today are social issues in their core, like the Mandal and Babri Masjid - Ayodhya issues at present. In important ways, society in India has attenuated the centricity of the state centre. The pri­mary goals of social transformation remain a modernized Indian society; caste and communalism still remain high on the agenda of reform. The na­ture and role of the Indian state are not exactly serious issues in the pre­vailing intellectual thought process.

There are dissenting voices in both China and India which contest the validity of this mainstream devel­opmental experience. In China, the divide between the moderates and the hardliners is centred on the limits and magnitude of private autonomy and initiative. While the central guiding role of the state is part of the shared consensus, the debate draws its strength from the issue of empowerment of civil society. There are no definite ways of drawing lines on how far can this empowerment go? In India, critiques of the state have emanated from radical ideological posi­tions which have subjected its non-­representative class character to searching scrutiny; a divide is posited between the people and the state. In general the crucial question still re­mains as to how far can the state be allowed to intervene.

In both China and India, there is atleast one specific time period when alternative experiments seem to have been tried out. Under these experi­ments, the Chinese state deliberately took a seat and allowed “society” to express itself and flourish while the Indian society witnessed for sometime the power-play and the frightening reach of the state apparatus. The ref­erences are to the “small government, big society” movement in China and to the period of Emergency in India.

The “small government, big society” approach in China was for­mally proposed in 1988 when Hainan island was declared a special economic zone and given a provincial status. However, experiments in this direction had clearly started in the middle of 1980s when the Chinese media began to provide systematic stories of emer­gency of interest groups and people’s organizations in China. Many of these stories conveyed proposals that envis­aged a reduced role of government agencies and visualized the setting up of consumer organisations, trade un­ions, business associations and the like which would represent the inter­ests of their own members and act as a bridge between the state organs and the people. Between 1986 and 1988, many such associations with appar­ently autonomous sources of legitima­tion were reported to be functioning at various levels. Tiananmen aborted this experiment as it was then realized that the Chinese state cannot afford to al­low interest groups to dictate to the government.

In the case of Emergency in India, the state took upon itself many of the functions which had hitherto remained the preserves of civil society. A new order was proclaimed by the state to usher in a disciplined society which would have no space for articu­lation of purely “parochial” demands. The state moved in slowly to control and guide the thought process and behaviour of its people. Strict censor­ship of the media and widespread arrests of opponents established new modes of governance. For a time, Indian society seemed utterly helpless in the face of this unprecedented ruthless­ness of the state. In retaliatory moves, the political regime that had imposed this emergency was defeated at the polls and the post-Emergency state re­treated to its, time-tested role of bal­ancing, conciliation and appeasement.

Clearly, these widely divergent patterns of symbiosis between govern­ment and society have come to stay in China and India. Beyond a certain point, civil society does not seem to have a future in China while the state in India must remain weak and decentred. This seems to be most likely scenario as these societies move into the 21st century. There is however nothing in this suggestion that these patterns are unalterable or linked in-extricably with the pasts of these so­cieties.

III

It is often believed that China and India exhibit in their modernity certain deep-rooted forms of their past traditions. The authoritarianism of the Chinese state and the pervasive power of caste in India are easy explanations. Undoubtedly, the state has remained in China the primary focus of realiza­tion and reform while Indian tradition has been pre-eminently concerned with self and society.

In Chinese classics, civil society remains a marginal category and the real action almost invariably takes place in and for a kingdom. A reformed state perpetually concerned with a protection of people’s livelihood re­mains a recurrent ideal. In contrast, Indian classics are replete with con­cerns of ritual and release; idealized relations are primarily kinship­centred. Notwithstanding Mahatma Gandhi, there is no serious effort whatsoever to work out a “Ram-rajya” in Hindu thought categories. There can be exceptions in both traditions but the dominant thrust remains unmistakable.

However, the conclusions that have been derived from this thrust by Eastern social science need to be re­viewed and some of the apparently settled issues of continuity and change in China and India ought to be reo­pened. What is it in the make-up of the modern Chinese state or of the modern Indian society that can be convincingly understood with reference to their “past” traditions and histories? When China and India will exhaust their current projects of mod­ernity, this question may likely to be raised at some point in the 21st cen­tury.

While a certain kind of civiliza­tional filtering is no doubt present in the modern Chinese state and the modern Indian society, the ways of understanding these filterings lie not so much in the unfolding of their tra­ditions as in their modernities.

The space for civil society that existed under traditional Chinese state has shrunk as a result of China’s conscious quest for certain forms of western authoritarianism. The Chinese reformers of the late 19th and early 20th century looked at Germany and Russia as their models. Strong states­men who could produce a new kind of citizen in the process of building their nation inspired the Chinese reform agenda. This blatantly architectural metaphor is not intrinsically Chinese. It occurs in Plato’s Republic, in Calvin’s Geneva, in Nazi Germany and in several other typically Western contexts. Mao’s equation of people with a blank sheet and his efforts to remake a new kind of Chinese man under the auspices of the state needs to be understood with reference to some of these essentially Western ter­minology. Confucian tradition at all times allowed a much larger degree pr autonomy to interest groups in thought and in practice in so far as such autonomy did not impinge upon the state’s inherent right to govern the people.

Similarly, the modern India could have learnt this new fundamen­talism only from the actual historical experience of Semitic religions. No civilization could have come upon its own with disputes on the precise location of a temple. The interface of religion, territory and jurisdiction is clearly of Western origin. Again, it must be purely rational calculus of electoral politics and the corollary of capturing political power that turns issues of OBCs into mass protests and agitations. It is indeed a secular­ized Indian mind, the kind that was high on the agenda of India’s leaders, that has lost its moorings and has become completely rootless in its own soil. Under the doctrinal norms of tradition, there was always a sharp dissociation of status, wealth and power which facilitated a symbiosis of different social strata. Under western forms of social stratification, a single class almost always tried to appropri­ate access to positions, resources and coercive forces. The distortions of modern Indian society need to be understood in many important ways with reference to these western social formations.

A second look at traditions of China and India should logically oc­cupy a prominent place on the agenda of intellectual discourse of the 21st century. All of us need to re-read our books on western history and learn to deconstruct fairy tales of western pro­gression from freedom and prosperity. The medieval period perhaps started there earlier than hitherto believed and it has perhaps not yet ended. Meanwhile, there is no reason for us to be needlessly apologetic for our histo­ries - for ways in which states and societies functioned in China and India in the past - in any East-West social science dialogue.